October 25, 1998

By ANDREA HIGBIE

SLAVE IN A BOX
The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. By M. M. Manring.
University Press of Virginia,
cloth, $47.50; paper, $14.95.

'se in town honey,'' Aunt Jemima announced in early advertisements for the pancake mix that has borne her name and image since the 1890's. This apocryphal figure has always provoked resentment among black people, and understandably so, as M. M. Manring points out in ''Slave in a Box.'' Aunt Jemima was cartoonish at best and demeaning at worst, starting life, Manring writes, ''as a white man, in drag, wearing blackface, singing on the minstrel stage.'' The odd twists of Aunt Jemima's career took her to many advertising pages of women's magazines as well as to the 1893 World's Fair stage and hundreds of county fairs, where a former slave and her successors were hired to portray her. She still adorns the Quaker Oats pancake, waffle and syrup containers, though today she is thinner and stylish, wearing earrings instead of a bandanna. ''Who cares?'' Manring asks, and then ably shows why so many people did and still do, regarding Aunt Jemima not as a neutral part of the consumer landscape but as a damaging racial image. From the start, the Aunt Jemima advertising campaign ''traded on themes of racism and sexism, on a relentlessly sentimental and unrealistic portrait of slave life and Old South hospitality,'' Manring, an independent scholar in Columbia, Mo., writes. Though repetitive, ''Slave in a Box'' is absorbing in its thickly and thoughtfully layered analysis of the mammy whose pancake mix, the ads promised, ''made women womanly, men manly and turned boys into Eagle Scouts.''